Cat predicts 50 deaths in RI nursing home
Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death. Read full story from telegraph.co.uk

US Baptists ‘knew taking children out of Haiti was wrong’
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said some of the children have parents who are alive. The government is attempting to locate them. He says a judicial system needs to determine whether the Americans were acting in good faith – as they claim – or are child traffickers. Read full story from independent.co.uk

Cross found at Air Force Academy’s Wicca center
Reporting from Denver – The Air Force Academy, stung several years ago by accusations of Christian bias, has built a new outdoor worship area for pagans and other practitioners of Earth-based religions. Read full story from latimes.com

Not so smart after all
New Age is a spiritual movement that combines astrology, folk religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism, physics, psychology and more. Though it can incorporate elements of mainstream Western religions (Christianity, Judaism), New Age rejects their dogma. Important to many followers is the Harmonic Convergence, a planet alignment tied to the Mayan calendar, last occurring in 1987. Read full story from theleafchronicle.com

Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries
Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009. Read full story from nytimes.com

Voodoo Dialogue
In the wreckage of the earthquake, in that heavily Christian-Voodoo nation surely some whispered Psalms, words born in Hebrew, now shared, a crying from “out of the depths.” It is an island punished by nature but not God forsaken. Many Haitians believe that even before the rescuers arrived, God was with the mourners on the mattresses in the dirt, and on the pieces of cardboard that pass for mattresses. Read full story from thejewishweek.com

Top boutique hotel haunted after cellar refurbishment
STAFF at a top boutique hotel believe they may be accommodating some extra guests after hearing strange noises coming from the basement. Read full story from deadlinescotland

Why Detox?
Detoxes and cleanses are all the rage in the world of wellness. If you know someone who religiously practices yoga, gets acupuncture, or reads up on nutrition, chances are, they’ve done the Master Cleanse or some such other fad cleanse at least once. Read full story from examiner.com

Comanche Nation blasted by ice
LAWTON, Okla. – In the aftermath of a brutal ice storm Jan. 28, the Comanche Nation went into full emergency management system mode and opened a command center to field response operations, officials said. Read full story from indiancountrytoday.com

Eric Christensen Accused of Killing, Dismembering Girlfriend Sherry Harlan Because She Was a “Warlock”
According to court documents, Christensen, 40, has told police that when he found out his girlfriend, 35-year-old Sherry Harlan, was talking to another man, he forced her to take a Wiccan blood oath, making her promise she’d end all contact. Christensen says he found a text message from the guy on Harlan’s phone shortly thereafter, a transgression that he alleges made her a “‘warlock,’ literally an evil traitor.” Read full story from seattleweekly.com

The Irish calendar – staying grounded with the 8 seasonal holidays
Some cultures call the Equinox and Solstice the start of the season. The Irish start the seasons between them with cross-quarter holidays–Imbolc, Bealtine, Lughnasadh, Samhain–and think of the equinoxes and solstices as the zenith of the seasons. Read full story from irishcentral.com

Cotton Mather & the Salem Witch Trials
“If they do good, it is only that they may do hurt.”  So preached the Reverend Cotton Mather in 1689, three years before the horrific hysteria that was the Salem Witch Trials, in a sermon entitled “A Discourse in Witchcraft,” which was then printed and circulated as part of a larger collection, Mather’s Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possession.  Although Mather was speaking of witches in that line, asserting that there were no such thing as “good” witches, he would have done well to apply the line to himself; Mather succeeded in causing more harm, albeit unintentionally, for his community with his discourse, despite the seemingly honorable intention of alerting the Boston townspeople to the dangers of witchcraft.  In his attempt to educate the people of Boston about the evils of magic, Cotton Mather, through his discourse, inadvertently assisted in fueling the hysteria that caused the Salem Witch Trials by creating an environment of unease and distrust among townspeople. Read full story from australia.to

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.